Media and Minorities

German Television Crime Films and German Emotions  97
Fig. 2: Film still Schimanski, Das Geheimnis des Golem (© Foto: WDR/Uwe Stratmann)
plementary conceptions about Jews reemerge: the conception of their power
and that of their physical inferiority.18 When Schimanski encounters Lea
Kaminski, this ambivalent emotional setting becomes erotically charged.
At the film’s end, Schimanski’s emotional setting receives a Jewish absolution:
the moral okay of a Holocaust survivor’s daughter. Lea Kaminski bids
Schimanski farewell. Both go their own ways. Kaminski ruminates silently
about him: “In Judaism we have an expression for a person like you: You are a
just man.” She looks after him — Schimanski is still in the frame — and finally
says, just as before so that he cannot hear her but the viewer can, “Take
care — Shalom.”
At the dramaturgical center of both episodes, we find triangular emotional
constellations with Blum, Leeb, and Wolfgang Rodammer as well as with
Schimanski, Kaminski, and Ginsburg as cornerstones. All of the characters
have sympathetic traits, and in their relationships, several desires, partially
in conflict with one another, intersect: namely desires oriented toward eros,
18 On the visual tradition of these concepts, see, for instance, Helmut Gold and Georg
Heuberger, eds., Abgestempelt: Judenfeindliche Postkarten; auf der Grundlage der Sammlung
Wolfgang Haney. Eine Publikation der Museumsstiftung Post und Telekommunikation
und des Jüdischen Museums Frankfurt (Heidelberg: Umschau Braus,
1999).
© 2016, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen
ISBN Print: 9783525300886 — ISBN E-Book: 9783666300882